After a few thousand people read a past post, I thought it was because I wrote about family and personal matters. Then I came to my senses and knew it was because of religion, even though there’s no shortage of religious stuff on the Internet, a place where God both dies in YouTube videos and hides in vibrantly insane and ancient Geocities accounts. There are thousands of other religious blogs, so why did strangers read and share mine?

Religious blogs, for the most part, present themselves complete with nothing else other than thankfulness for the monotonous: food on the table, gas in the tank, an eager lover, unbroken windows, safety from fellow humans. Instead of thanking years of education, economics coupled with good judgment, or everything the middle class expects, these blogs occupy the space so many dead grandmothers can no longer fill, and simply give thanks to another day, or kick around questions carefully framed in a belief system and ever ask: If I chunk my faith to the toxic breeze, what’s left to work with?

Most, after finding or losing religion can’t seem to stop talking about the change; they treat their new discovery like they’ve just discovered the spiked punch bowl of an orgasm, and act as if they were college sophomores who had just read Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States, with enough passion to ruin any peaceful Thanksgiving by raving how the world should be. Though I’d rather talk about sexual tension between carnie folk in the shadows of a lion cage in the big top, I see that when religion is touched on, people will read a blog, or an article, or even love a sport star like it, or they, is something supremely important. And, once again: Why? That’s easy. It’s because religion is the supreme topic, even though there are alternative choices when it comes to religion, with alternative gods, which says something about humans more than it does about divinity—there are other blogs, and somehow I keep religious company more than most people who enjoy my lack of faith. Those are the people who read what I posted. I think it’s because people more than flirt with the idea of tettering past a few degrees of unbelief. Other people want more than what a god offers, which, at best, is a simple extension, or, at worst, a total replacement of personality. People know faith is simply agnosticism because it offers nothing but presumptions about the invisible and knowing the unknown, and after an AMEN, all that hangs above their heads is silence because faith only supports itself and fills the gap between evidence and the total lack of it. Those people are living an unlived life—someone else’s, and they know it; they’ll only examine it through someone else who is willing to sacrifice their nonexistent soul, because religious faith strives above all else to leave the faithful stagnate and inefficient when it comes to their own beliefs: circular and constantly at odds with secularism. There is no self-criticism in religion. The Dalai Lama can talk about how science advances humanity more than prayers do, but he will never drop the “His Holiness” prefix and tell a crowd of impoverished Tibetan legions that he isn’t god, and that they should strive and toil only to better this world for their children, because that’s the only chance at reincarnation and immortality that they really have.

There is no criticism in religion, there is only doubt that you failed the tenants, or that you should be inspired to drag society down with you, back to the the Dark Ages, when belief had power over life and dead, not just who wins at football games or what being brought the a modest September rain. I know people know this. They know the world isn’t a burden on them, but their beliefs are a burden on the world. Their ignorance is called God, and they know it, because a good God is the world of smart men and nothing more. If you speak up about this, though, the most religious who are emotionally closest to you either try to talk you off the ledge of a new experience, or attempt to murder you. It all depends on the stage in which the society you live in has poisoned itself with that smut called secularism. Mostly, though, people direct you to church leaders, or they direct the leaders to your front door or email account. Why? What makes them know God or His book better than you? At best, there’s only a difference in fundamental understanding, but never a total comprehension of the subject you flirt with rejecting because there is no gnosis. Claiming special knowledge is so anti-human that it could only be religious! Like the Internet, the real world is full of people who will tell other what to believe, what to do, and while grammar and sentences fail me, or rather, I fail them. I will be charitable enough to say that not many can read better than I can. And, at the end, that’s all one has: your own mind to goddamn Him or glorify Him, but He won’t speak unless someone else speaks for Him, and when you listen, that’s when you abandon reason, suckle at authority, and the problems of our world never end. After a nine hundred and twenty words, all this sounds like something that everyone has heard before, just like what’s found on religious blogs and in the mouths of religious people, or spewing from adamant Hell bound hell hounds. I’d rather say something new, something more than faith or disbelief, something human.